Chapter 14 Narod
NAROD
The tear in the bin sits there, four neat pieces of a document I had not yet submitted, and I feel the panic rise through me with the same particular quality as an actuarial anomaly, the kind where the data suddenly reveals a catastrophic liability that the initial model failed to account for.
I stand up.
It happens fast.. My body has always had a habit of moving before my brain has finished its calculations, which is deeply inconvenient for a man in my professional position, and doubly so for a man who spent thirty-one years learning to be very, very careful about the space he occupies.
The bed frame, which is reinforced titanium because standard human bed frames tend to voice their structural objections quite loudly, exhales with relief as my weight leaves it, and I am standing, and Livia is standing, and the distance between us is two and a half feet and narrowing because she is looking at me with those dark eyes and her hands are still warm on my jaw from three seconds ago and I need that distance to think.
"You should not have done that," I say.
It comes out more formal. Everything comes out more formal when I am frightened, which is a personality flaw I have catalogued extensively but been unable to correct despite three separate courses of professional development.
Livia tilts her head. "Torn up a piece of paper?"
"Prevented me from using proper professional channels to manage the situation.
" I take the two and a half feet and make them three.
I turn toward the window, which is the large one that looks out over the rain-slicked street, the one I chose this apartment for specifically because the scale is right and because the glass is reinforced and because standing at it on difficult evenings creates the impression of a manageable boundary between myself and the city outside.
"I have been processing the available data for several weeks.
The transfer request is the statistically sound outcome. "
"The statistically sound outcome," she repeats, and her voice is quiet and very flat in the way that I have learned, across these weeks, indicates that she is not agreeing with me.
"Inter-species relationships." I fold my hands behind my back.
My knuckles are pressing together harder than is comfortable.
"The sociological literature is not encouraging.
Longitudinal studies across the last two decades demonstrate a seventy-eight percent higher incidence of sustained social friction for couples with significant physiological divergence.
Higher rates of public hostility. Elevated stress markers for the human partner particularly.
" I pause. "Your cortisol levels concern me on a chronic basis. "
"My cortisol levels."
"You hold tension in your shoulders. You have since the first evening.
I notice it particularly when you are in public with me.
" I keep my eyes on the window. "This is not a sustainable model, Livia.
The dinner party was not an isolated incident.
It was a data point in a trend. Tonight's event follows the pattern with almost mathematical precision.
And the friction will compound. My presence in your social sphere creates a recurring liability that your existing relationships cannot absorb, as evidenced by the restructuring you performed this evening at the restaurant, which was significant collateral damage that I feel a specific and acute responsibility for generating. "
I am very aware that I am talking too much.
This is a known mechanism, the way I build walls out of words because I have very few other materials available and the walls need to be high enough to contain the things I am not saying, which are considerably less organized and considerably more distressing than the things I am.
The things I am saying are, broadly, accurate.
The literature is real. The statistics are real.
I have read the studies more than once. I have cross-referenced them with demographic modelling and social integration data and regional hostility indices and I have, in the very worst part of three consecutive nights last week, built a formal probability model of my own and run Livia's life trajectory through it twice, once with my continued presence as a variable, once without, and the results were not ambiguous.
"So you've built a spreadsheet," Livia says.
"A model." I correct this on professional reflex and then immediately wish I hadn't. "A risk-adjusted model incorporating several key variables."
The silence extends. The rain outside has the particular persistence of a city storm that has decided it is here for the duration.
I watch a bus pass on the street below, its windows blurred with condensation, its passengers visible in smeared impressions of ordinary human lives proceeding in ordinary human directions, and I think, not for the first time, that I have always been better at watching ordinary human lives from a moderate distance than participating in them.
I became an actuary for this reason. I am very good at the mathematics of other people's futures.
I am very good at assessing risk and quantifying probability and preparing against outcomes that have not yet arrived but are statistically inevitable.
I am good at this because it gives me something to do with the part of my brain that cannot stop calculating, the part that looked at Livia Chordas sitting in that cocktail bar in her sensible cardigan with her dark hair tucked behind her ear and immediately began running projections for every possible way this ends badly.
There are seventy-three distinct pathways.
Fifty-one of them result from sustained social attrition. Nine from my own failures of self-regulation. Thirteen from miscellaneous factors I have categorised as environmental.
None of them, and I want to be extremely clear about this, because the precision matters, none of them feel as bad as the one I am currently executing.
"Narod."
Her voice is different. Not flat now. Something softer than that, and I don't turn around because I know something about the particular quality of that softness and I know it will compromise my processing.
"The seventy-eight percent," she says. "Is that the actual number?"
"Yes."
"And you sat in your apartment and built a model with me in it."
"I ran it twice." I pause. "I ran it three times. I changed the regional variable when I considered that Minneapolis has a documented lower incidence of interspecies hostility in metropolitan areas. The model improved marginally."
"Marginally."
"Three and a half percent. Which is," I add, because I cannot stop myself, "within the margin of error and therefore statistically inconclusive."
"Narod." A long pause. "Turn around."
I don't want to. This is not a statement I make often, because I spent the majority of my adult life training myself out of wanting things that are strategically inadvisable, and I have been broadly successful.
I do not want things that will break. I do not sit on chairs that weren't rated for my weight.
I do not eat at restaurants whose tables can't withstand the incidental pressure of a hand placed flat against them while I'm reaching for the pepper.
I have calibrated my desires very precisely to match the available structural capacity of the environment I inhabit.
Livia Chordas is not calibrated. She arrived with no structural documentation whatsoever and she grabbed my wrist in a cocktail bar with her tiny, furious hand and said you're an actuary, like actually, and every model I had ran directly off its own axis.
I turn around.
She is standing in the same position, hands at her sides, chin lifted slightly the way she does when she is refusing to concede a point.
She is in the dark jeans she wore to the dinner party and the cream-coloured blouse she picked carefully because she wanted to look appropriate for her friends, and her hair is damp at the ends from the rain, and her glasses have a very faint smear on the left lens from where she pushed them up in the cab because she was thinking hard, and I know she was thinking hard because she always pushes them up when she is calculating, and I know this because I have been paying attention.
I have been paying attention since the first evening.
I have been paying attention more precisely and more comprehensively than I have paid attention to anything in my professional or personal life, which is saying something considerable, because I am a man whose professional attention to detail is considered exceptional even by the standards of an industry composed primarily of people whose defining characteristic is exceptional attention to detail.
There is one tear on her face. Just one.
It sits at the outer corner of her right eye and it has tracked down her cheekbone, not far, and she hasn't wiped it away, and she isn't crying in the dramatic sense, she is just standing there being entirely honest and entirely small in the way that she is, which is to say not small in any way that matters but small relative to this apartment and relative to my furniture and relative to me, and she is not frightened, she was never frightened, and the tear is just sitting there on her face like a piece of data I have absolutely no framework to process.
"My life," she says, and her voice is very steady, "does not fit in a spreadsheet, Narod."
I don't say anything. My throat has developed a problem.
"I know you have the numbers." She lifts one hand and presses it flat against her sternum, which is a gesture she makes when she's being very deliberate, I have noted it several times.
"I know the literature is real. I know people have been awful to you and I know people will probably be awful again and I know you have a model that proves this.
" She exhales. "But the only friction I care about, the only number that means anything to me, is the one where you are in the column labelled not here.
" Her chin doesn't waver. "And I am telling you that number is unacceptable.
I am telling you that the model is flawed because it doesn't account for the fact that I am standing in your apartment in wet jeans having abandoned my entire social infrastructure tonight specifically because none of it was worth what you are worth, and I need you to hear that as data. "
The tear tracks a little further.
I cross the room.
Two strides. Possibly the least careful two strides I have taken in years, because the usual internal protocols that govern my movement in domestic human spaces, the ones that run the constant quiet background calculations about shelf proximity and breakable objects and the structural tolerance of the floor, none of them are running.
I am not running anything. I am just moving, and then I am there, and Livia is looking up at me with her glasses slightly fogged from the warmth of the apartment and that single tear doing something to my chest that I do not have precise professional vocabulary for, and my hands find her face before I have consciously authorised them to do so.
She is very warm. She is always very warm, which I have noted and never commented on because commenting on the body temperature of a person you are interested in seems outside the range of acceptable early-relationship discourse, but she is warm against my palms and her cheekbones are sharp and I can feel where the tear has tracked and I am very careful, I am always trying to be very careful, but my thumbs are moving of their own conviction and the tear is gone.
She doesn't move. She lets me.
"The model," I say, and my voice sounds different to me right now, lower and rougher and stripped of its careful formal architecture in a way I don't entirely intend. "The model has a significant methodological flaw."
"Yeah?" She is looking straight up at me. Not flinching. Never flinching.
"It does not account for the variable of your opinion being correct." I swallow, which is effortful. "I weighted my own assessment above yours. This was an error. Actuarially speaking."
A very small and very specific expression crosses her face. Not a smile yet, but the preceding condition for one, the thing that happens to the corners of her mouth before she decides to let the smile out.
"Actuarially speaking," she says.
"I am also," I add, because the other thing needs saying and I have been not saying it for three weeks and the structural integrity of the wall is at zero, "profoundly unwilling to be in Minneapolis.
The data on this particular variable is not ambiguous.
I am unwilling at a level I find difficult to express in professional terms."
"Try," she says.
"I ran the model a fourth time." My thumbs are still against her cheekbones.
I cannot seem to retrieve them. "Last Tuesday.
I changed every variable I could justify changing.
Regional hostility index, social integration coefficient, projected cortisol reduction over time with consistent positive environmental reinforcement.
" I pause. "The column labelled not here was unacceptable in every run. "
She steps forward. She covers the remaining distance, which is very little, and her hands come up to my chest and rest there, flat, over the place where my heartbeat is currently conducting itself with very little professional decorum.
"Narod," she says.
"Yes."
"Stop running the model."
My forehead comes down to meet hers. She tilts up to meet me, which she always does, which she has done since the sofa and the stairwell and every quiet morning since when I have woken beside her and immediately begun calculating the earliest plausible reason to leave before she woke, and she always tilts up to meet me, and I have never in my life had less interest in the available exit routes.
"I am," I tell her, very quietly, "experiencing significant difficulty with that instruction."
"I know." Her fingers press in slightly. "Do it anyway."
The rain continues outside. The four pieces of the transfer request sit in the bin beside the desk. My hands slide carefully from her face to her shoulders, and she is warm, and the model is quiet, and the exit routes are entirely irrelevant, and I stay exactly where I am.